What the History of Salt, Slaves and the Mine Wars Teaches Us About Change in Appalachia

Lilly, a member of the kids' church congregation at Cedar Grove United Methodist Church, examines a sound recorder

Roger May

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of a series of novels called The Beulah Quintet. The novels are by the late Mary Lee Settle, a writer who set out to capture moments in West Virginia history when a revolutionary change was at stake. Today's economic uncertainty here in Appalachia has many people wondering whether we are also living in the midst of a transition.

Producer Catherine Moore was inspired to capture all this in an hour-long radio documentary called Cedar Grove, featured in this week's episode of Inside Appalachia. "There's just kind of a feeling in the air, right now, in central Appalachia, that we have reached a moment, or a crossroads, where we're gonna have to choose a path for our future. So yeah when I discovered that aspect of Mary Lee Settle's work it really resonated with me, as we face the projected long-term decline of coal.

"So that was a big inspiration for me to make this documentary. I wanted to explore that idea of what these times are like, and I do think that if we're going to survive here we're gonna have to look for new ways of being," Moore said.

Moore said, "[Mary Lee Settle] set each of her books in her Beulah Quintet in what she called "pitch points" or "seed points", which she thought of as moments right on the edge of a deep and profound societal change. She wanted to see the kinds of choices people were making and how those choices were impacting the future."

Shirley Stennett and Patty Thurmon are sisters who own and operate The Haven, a rest home, in the Cedar Grove mansion, which was the Tompkins ancestral home.

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This year marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of a series of novels called The Beulah Quintet. The novels are by the late Mary Lee Settle, a writer who set out to capture moments in West Virginia history when a revolutionary change was at stake. Today's economic uncertainty here in Appalachia has many people wondering whether we are also living in the midst of a transition.

Our roots with coal run deep here in central Appalachia. But the future for the people in the Appalachian coalfields is unclear. Although coal will likely still continue to be mined, it doesn’t seem like jobs in this industry will ever come back, not like they once were. People in the coalfields are worried. Jobs are disappearing -- and there isn’t a lot of hope right now.

How do the wordsmiths of today describe Appalachians? The people who don't let a day go by without putting down on paper a song, or a rhyme, or a tale that they just had to get off their chest? What kind of worlds do they create in their writings?

Not many Americans know the story of the Mine Wars that were fought between workers, labor unions and mine company guards during the early 1900s. In this show, Jessica Lilly talks with filmmaker Randy MacLowry, whose new PBS documentary The Mine Wars focuses on these armed uprisings by labor organizers in the coalfields of southern West Virginia.